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Born to be wild: Bison released in Banff National Park already beginning to roam

EDMONTON—Two bison who have wandered from a herd recently released into Banff National Park illustrate the complexities of reintroducing a species into a landscape vastly different from the one they once freely roamed.

“We are monitoring them daily, we have satellite collars,” said Bill Hunt, resource conservation manager in Banff National Park in an interview Wednesday. “We’re keeping fairly close tabs on them.”

Officials say 31 bison were released into a 1,200-square-kilometre zone along the park's eastern slopes that features meadows and grassy valleys for grazing. (Dan Rafla / The Canadian Press)

Bison mother and calf walk in Banff National Park in this undated handout photo. Three bison babies have been born in the backcountry of Banff National Park, the first "made-in-Banff" calves in more than 140 years. Two of the calves were born on July 15, while the third was born on July 19. (Peter White / The Canadian Press)

Bulls of the Banff National Park wild plains bison herd relax in the summer sun in this recent handout photo. Parks Canada says wild plains bison that were reintroduced to Banff National Park are now officially free-roaming animals. (Dan Rafla / The Canadian Press)

The two wanderers are part of the original group of 16 plains bison from Elk Island National Park who were reintroduced into the remote Panther River Valley in Banff National Park in February 2017 as part of a $6.4-million five-year pilot project to bring wild bison back to the park.

“They’ve been absent in Banff for over 140 years, before the park was even established,” said Hunt.

Ten of those bison calves in the Panther River Valley site, approximately 40 kilometres north of Banff, during their first season.

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“Seven of the 10 cows have calves so far this year, two of those were after the release, so we have our first two born in the wild, born to be wild, in the last 140 years,” said Hunt.

After being officially let loose into the park earlier this month, 31 of the bison have remained close, as hoped, to the site where they were held for the first 18 months.

However, two 4-year-old males have wandered northeast and are now grazing in the Red Deer Valley, just outside of Banff National Park.

While conservationists are trying to encourage the males to move back east to avoid any possible conflicts with people or livestock, Hunt says for now the bison seem content.

“There is some really good habitat there, so it is actually holding them. They haven’t wandered very much away from the area of the Ya Ha Tinda Ranch,” said Hunt. The Ya Ha Tinda Ranch is a horse ranch operated by Parks Canada.

While introducing bison back into the park was a feat in itself, training them to stay there posed its own challenges.

Bison have traditionally freely roamed the prairies, depleting resources in one area before moving to the next to graze.

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But with modern infrastructure including highways, railways, golf courses, homes and town centres surrounding the park, conservationists have a vested interest in keeping them near the remote Panther Valley.

In consulting stakeholders before releasing the bison, Hunt said conservationists learned from bison ranchers that female bison, no matter how far they may roam, will always return to the place they have calved.

That’s why conservationists brought bison to the site and held them in a secure area of the park for 18 months before they were fully released, allowing the cows to have two rounds of births in an attempt to have encourage them to stay close.

“Regardless of where they may wander within the park or during the rest of the year, each spring they’ll come back to that site and it acts like a homing beacon to bring them into a safe, secure area to calve,” Hunt said.

By training the cows in the herd to stay close to that area, Hunt says they will draw the bulls back during rutting season, preventing them from wandering too far.

“We would hope to see these males suddenly realize they want to be back with the herd,” Hunt said.

Another way of keeping the bison close to home, said Hunt, was making their new habitat as welcoming as possible.

“Bison are very drawn to areas that have been recently burned. Burning meadows, burning grasslands brings up fresh, new shoots that are very palatable for bison. Over the past few years we’ve been doing some burning and even this spring we went in and burned some meadows in areas and that is some of the habitat they are using right now,” said Hunt.

By managing the size of the herd so they have plenty of food to eat where they are, Hunt says conservationists are hoping the bison won’t feel the need to seek out greener pastures.

“They are an animal that was historically very nomadic and in large herds they would often consume everything in an area and move on to the next area. Our goal in this project is to manage the herd size over a long period of time so that we’re not depleting the resources, and with that we’re hoping they will be less likely to wander,” said Hunt.

Researchers are using various ecological measures to quantify the impact the bison are having on their surrounding habitat so they can better determine how many bison the park can sustain. Hunt believes by the end of the pilot, the park may have two or three times as many resident wild bison.

“Even while the herd is relatively small we’re measuring effects on vegetation, on other ungulates, on predators, on stream ecology for both fish and invertebrates, on song bird ecology … even things like dung beetles and animals that benefit from bison droppings or scavengers that benefit from deceased bison,” Hunt said. “We are looking at that whole ecosystem effect and from that we’ll try, at the end of the five years, to come up with some recommended carrying capacities for an optimal bison herd size.”

Hunt said bison are a “keystone species” and their presence in the park plays a role at every level of the local environment.

Hunt hopes the return of the bison will bring with them an increase in the number of songbirds that once relied on their shedded fur to line their nests.

“These birds have been nesting every spring with whatever they can find, historically they would have had reams of shedding bison winter coat every spring to use as nesting material. We may see improvements in songbird survival because of bison back on the landscape,” Hunt said.

The return of the bison to Banff National Park may also help revive the traditional cultures native to the area.

“These are such an important spiritual animal for Indigenous people in Canada, similar to Caribou in the North or salmon on the coast. Plains people are bison people,” said Hunt adding returning the bison to Banff National Park is in keeping with the Buffalo Treaty, signed by Indigenous people in Canada and the United States in 2014 and 2015.

The treaty calls for a return of wild bison to North America after over hunting decimated bison herds and with them a traditional way of life for Indigenous people on the plains.

Claire Theobald is an Edmonton-based reporter who covers crime and the courts. Follow her on Twitter: @clairetheobald

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